I read in a few places on how to make small beer. At least from what I read in two brewing blogs, you just take the spent grains and run again post sparge of the first running that becomes the first beer or stronger version. The second running becomes the small beer. Not sure if that is exactly how one makes small beer, so I wanted to ask others thoughts?

That's my understanding of how Anchor Steam makes their Small Beer. In fact, this is what they say on their website: "We make our Old Foghorn Barleywine Style Ale from the rich first runnings of an all-malt mash, and Anchor Small Beer is our attempt to duplicate the "small beers" of old by sparging that same mash: sprinkling warm water over the Old Foghorn mash after the first wort has run off, thereby creating a second, lighter brew from the resulting thinner wort."

It's probably a great way to get the most from the mash of a really big beer, like a Barleywine. The one thing that concerns me about the technique is that I mash low gravity beers warm, to give them some body. However I mash larger beers cooler to get them to ferment out as much as possible. It seems like the two would be exclusive, but apparently brewers get it to work.